Many of my fans, friends, and family members have now responded to my Facebook post about children’s amazing ability to remember their time before birth. It began with a conversation I had with my personal assistant here on Maui, Dee Garnes. Nineteenth century British poet, William Wordsworth, expressed the idea that we gradually lose our intimate knowledge of heaven as we grow up. In his poem “Intimations of Immortality,” he says that “our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting” of our previous heavenly existence. “Trailing clouds of glory do we come/From God who is our home:/Heaven lies about us in our infancy,” says Wordsworth.

Dee and I talked about how the ones who know the most about God are those who have just recently been wrapped in the arms of the Divine, our infants and toddlers. Here is what Dee sent me regarding a conversation she had with her young son Marcus, a little boy I Continue Reading

An excerpt from my memoir, I Can See Clearly Now

It is April 1976, and I’m renting a house on Kime Avenue in West Babylon, New York. I’m continuing with my busy private counseling practice, along with my professional teaching duties at St. John’s University. I am also 100 percent determined that I’ll bring the message of Your Erroneous Zones to the world.

I’ve purchased 2,000 copies, which represents approximately one-third of the entire first printing, directly from the publisher. A few blocks from my home I’ve noticed a radio station’s call letters on the building: WBAB. I have no idea what kind of a format this station broadcasts, so I walk over one Friday afternoon and give the receptionist a copy of Your Erroneous Zones. I tell her Continue Reading

Learn to see clearly

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” Henry David Thoreau

People are referring to my new book I Can See Clearly Now as a memoir, but actually, as I was writing, I had something quite different in mind. It’s true that the book does visit all the quantum moments and turning points in my life, all the teachers who guided me. My real purpose, though, was not simply to review the past, but to honor the amazing Presence that was by my side every step of the way. And ultimately, I wanted to share with you the ways I found to look at my life in complete appreciation for all of it. I believe you can learn to see clearly, too.

Seeing your own life more clearly involves being acutely aware of anything and everything that creates excitement within your being. If it excites you, the very presence of that inner excitement is all the evidence you need to remind you that you’re aligned with your true essence. When you are following your bliss, you are most Continue Reading

Five Key Principles

In his newest public television special, which will begin airing nationwide in early March 2014, Dr. Wayne W. Dyer employs an intimate conversational format to reveal many of the private challenges behind his public success. He also describes the five key principles for seeing clearly now, which have guided him through all his important life choices, and which are available to you as well. These five principles—willingness, determination, fearlessness, compassion, and love—make up the rungs of a sacred ladder that can bring us all closer to our most sacred self.

Three of Dr. Dyer’s daughters—Saje, Serena, and Skye—as well as musician Alex Woodard contribute stories and song, and the appearance of these very special guests adds extra warmth and humor to the program. The result is a most beautiful and memorable experience, with ideas that you can incorporate immediately into your own life!

“There are no wrong roads taken to anywhere; there are no accidents. As we go along there are course corrections that we can make, and every experience that we have in our life is there to teach us something . . .” — Dr. Wayne W. Dyer

No place for excuses

Here’s a concept you won’t want to forget: passion always trumps excuses. Keep in mind that when I use the word passion, I’m not referring to the romantic notions that this concept conjures. Instead, I’m equating it to a vigorous kind of enthusiasm that you feel deep within you and that isn’t easy to explain or define. This kind of passion propels you in a direction that seems motivated by a force beyond your control. It’s the inner excitement of being on the right path, doing what feels good to you, and what you know you were meant to do.

It’s my contention that the mere presence of passion within you is all you need to fulfill your dreams. Remember that God is in no need of excuses, ever. The creative Divine Spirit is able to manifest anything it contemplates, and you and I are the results of its contemplating itself into material form. Thus, when we have an emotional reaction that feels like overwhelming passion for what we’re contemplating, we’re experiencing the God within us…and nothing can hold us back. Continue Reading

No one has ever seen the face of ego. It is like a ghost that we accept as a controlling influence in our lives. I look upon the ego as nothing more than an idea that each of us has about ourselves. The ego is only an illusion, but a very influential one. Letting the ego-illusion become your identity can prevent you from knowing your true self. Ego, the false idea of believing that you are what you have or what you do, is a backwards way of assessing and living life.

You’ve probably noticed the word AMBULANCE written backwards on the front of a vehicle so that a person seeing it in their rear-view mirror can read it. When you look into a mirror, what you see is backwards, too. Your right hand is your left, your eyes are reversed. You understand that this is a backward view that you are seeing and you make the appropriate adjustments. You do not confuse reality with the image in the mirror.

The ego-idea of yourself is very much like the mirror example, without the adjustments. Your ego wants you to look for the inside on the outside. The outer illusion is the major preoccupation of the ego.

The ego-idea has been with us ever since we began to think. It sends us false messages about our true nature. It leads us to make assumptions about what will make us happy and we end up Continue Reading

I have observed that society in general always seems to honor its living conformists and its dead troublemakers. All those who have ever made a difference in any profession have listened to the inner music they heard and proceeded independent of the opinions of others. That was certainly true of one of my favorite nonconformists, Henry David Thoreau, who walked to the beat of a different drum and followed the beliefs of his conscience. He knew that the beat you hear within yourself is your connection to your soul’s purpose.

My own eight children all march to the beat of their inner music, and in some cases it is definitely far away from what I hear. I’ve had to honor their instincts and their choices, and merely guided them out of harm’s way until they could be their own guides. I have always marched to my own beat, and most frequently it was inconsistent not only with my own immediate family, but with my culture as well. I could never find it in my heart to preach to my listeners to do it my way, when I’ve always pretty much ignored what was being preached to me.

An important teacher of mine, Abraham Maslow, always counseled that it was necessary for the self-actualized individual to be “independent of the good opinion of others.” Walk with Thoreau in your own mind. Continue Reading

Peace isn’t something you ultimately receive when you slow down the pace of your life. Peace is what you’re capable of being and bringing to every encounter and event in the waking moments of your life. Being peaceful is an inner attitude that you can enjoy when you’ve learned to silence your incessant inner dialogue. Being peaceful isn’t dependent on what your surroundings look like. It seldom has anything to do with what the people around you think, say, or do. A noiseless environment isn’t a requirement.

St. Francis’s famous prayer states it better than I can: “Make me an instrument of your peace.” In other words, St. Francis wasn’t asking God to provide him with peace. He was asking for guidance to be more like the peace he trusted was his Source. Being peace is different from looking for peace.

This principle isn’t about merely choosing tranquil thoughts when you’re feeling frayed and anxious. I suggest picturing a container deep within yourself out of which all your thoughts flow. Inside of this container, at its very center, imagine a candle flame. You need to make a commitment that this flame in the center of the container holding all your thoughts will never, ever even flicker, although the very worst may go before you. This is your container of peace, and only peaceful thoughts can fuel the burning candle. You don’t need to change your thoughts as much as you need to learn to be an energy of peace lighting the way and attracting serene, harmonious thoughts and beings. In this way, you’ll become a being of peace.

As a being of peace, you make a huge impact on those around you. It’s almost impossible to be totally stressed out in the presence of someone who has opted to be peace. Peace is a higher and faster energy—when you’re being peace, just your presence alone will often nullify the uneasiness and tension in those around you. The secret of this principle is: Be the peace and harmony you desire. You cannot get it from anything or anyone else.

“I’d love to write a book, if I only had the time.” Have you heard someone say this recently, or maybe even said it yourself? Do you really want to write a book or maybe paint or dance or sing or fulfill any creative longing that’s been sitting on the back burner of your life? And is time really the issue? We all have the same number of hours in a day and most of us make decisions about how to spend them. In my movie The Shift, we see a young mother rediscover her love of painting because she gives herself permission to do so. Instead of continuing to assume that her dream is impossible, she asks for the opportunity, the time, she needs and she gets it. Why don’t we do the things we say we want to do? In the vast cornucopia of excuses, not enough time or “I’m too busy,” easily tops the list. But how can a person be too busy to make room for what they love? Thoreau is right in saying that we have nobler faculties we need to pay attention to, in addition to all the other details that occupy our lives. If you fear the part of your soul that’s calling you to a higher place, then you’re probably using the “I’m too busy” excuse. There is time to do what you love when you step back and look at your life from a higher perspective. Make sure that fear, doubt, and unexamined beliefs about yourself and your talents are not the real culprits keeping you from your creative endeavor. Rather than telling yourself you are too busy to pursue an activity you love, use the following affirmation: I intend to take time for myself to live the life that I came here to live.

When Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” he was defending his practice of teaching his students to think for themselves, to examine the ideas that had been “given” to them. We all have thoughts that were given to us by our families, our society, our culture. These given thoughts are so pervasive and so ingrained that they seem like part of our very being, but that’s exactly why we need to dig in and examine them if we want a life worth living. Richard Brodie talks about these given thoughts or memes in his book Virus of the Mind as “thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes in your mind that can be spread to and from other people’s minds.” Memes are ideas that are transmitted, like viruses, and take up residence in our heads. Their presence can influence our behavior and limit us in ways we don’t even notice unless we make a real effort to examine what we think and why. Memes die hard because they’ve become who we think we are. They aren’t necessarily good or bad; some may even serve our health and well-being. But, if we allow these unexamined thoughts to become excuses for not living our best life, such as “I’ll always be poor, unlucky, overweight, shy, lonely, angry, addicted,” then they need to be hauled out into the sunlight and challenged. Don’t let your unexamined thoughts cause you pain and keep you from living your Divine purpose.

One of my secrets for feeling successful and attracting bountiful abundance into my life has been an internal axiom that I use virtually every day of my life. It goes like this: Change the way you look at things, and the things you look at change. This has always worked for me.

The truth of this little maxim is actually found in the field of quantum physics, which, according to some, is a subject that’s not only stranger than you think it is, it’s stranger than you can think. It turns out that at the tiniest subatomic level, the actual act of observing a particle changes the particle. The way we observe these infinitely small building blocks of life is a determining factor in what they ultimately become. If we extend this metaphor to larger and larger particles and begin to see ourselves as particles in a larger body called humanity or even larger—life itself—then it’s not such a huge stretch to imagine that the way we observe the world we live in affects that world.

Think of this little journey into quantum physics as a metaphor for your life. Your feelings of success and your experience of prosperity and abundance depend on your positive view of yourself, your life, and the Universe from which success and abundance come. Changing the way you look at things is an extremely powerful tool. Start by examining how you look at things. Is the Universe matching your way of looking?